Books
That France has excellent literature is well known. The country ranks first on the list of Nobel Prizes in literature by country. And in the land of the writers, many erotic books found their ways into the unlit bedrooms. Here you will find a list of masterpieces that show the richness of French erotic literary creation.
New Release
Écrits érotiques de femmes
Romain Enriquez, Camille Koskas
Bringing together almost 700 texts from all eras and genres, and featuring more than 200 women authors, this volume is the most ambitious erotic anthology of women’s literature to date.
Great names (Louise Labé, George Sand, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir) rub shoulders with a host of forgotten women writers, some of whose work is being reprinted here for the first time. Whether they are unknown or illustrious, they all share the same desire to assert themselves through literature as subjects of desire in their own right: this volume gives us a chance to hear their voices.
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Les Exploits d’un jeune Don Juan
Guillaume Apollinaire
Young Roger dreams only of girls and women, seduction, abandonment and embraces, smells and abundant forms… The teenager kisses, caresses and seduces everything that wears petticoats, stopping at nothing to satisfy his desires and complete his apprenticeship in love.
Obscene and ironic, Les Exploits d’un jeune Don Juan is a short erotic and pornographic novel written by Apollinaire around 1910. In the vein of another of his great novels that it echoes, Les Onze Mille Verges, the writer presents a text that is provocative to excess. However, the novel is not said to be Apollinaire’s creation but a translation from a German text. A raw, satirical text by Apollinaire, himself a great reader of Sade.
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The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
Catherine Millet
Already a well-know figure in the Parisian art scene, Catherine Millet surprised the world by publishing an account of her sex life. With an arousing distance and an astonishing sense of detail, she takes a look at her many erotic experiences.
Cold and amused, but always literary. This book is undoubtedly one of the most daring that the erotic French culture has given to literature. This book is undoubtedly one of the most daring that the erotic French culture has given to literature.
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Les Onze Mille Verges ou les Amours d’un hospodar
Guillaume Apollinaire
“If I held you in bed, I would prove my passion twenty times over. May the eleven thousand virgins or even the eleven thousand rods punish me if I am lying!” Vibescu from Bucharest has a big appetite, and it seems that in Paris the women have light thighs. Just enough to arouse the interest of our prince, who embarks on a frenetic journey of ‘infernal joy’ and licentious combinations, satire and subversion…
Les onze mille verges (The Eleven Thousand Rods) caused a scandal when it was published in 1907. Openly crude and provocative, it has often been compared to the works of Sade. Its ferocious irony and explicit scenes make it a major erotic tale, unclassifiable and disturbing …
Anyone who has not read Les Onze Mille Verges has never really read Apollinaire. ‘All of Apollinaire is there,’ with his predilection for certain words, his highly personal punctuation, his landscapes and his deep-seated obsessions, the study of which should shed light on a psychoanalytical reading of the poet’s works. In this respect, Les Onze Mille Verges is one of the most revealing books ever written
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Histoire d’O
Pauline Réage
“A woman who confesses! Finally! But admitting what? Whatever women have always defended themselves against (but never more so than today). What men have always reproached them for: that they never stop obeying their blood; that everything in them is sex, even their minds. That they need to be constantly fed, constantly washed and daubed, constantly beaten. All they need is a good master, and one who doesn’t trust his kindness.”
O is a young, beautiful fashion photographer in Paris. One day her lover, René, takes her to a château, where she is enslaved, with René’s approval, and systematically sexually assaulted by various other men. Later, René turns O over to Sir Stephen, an English friend who intensifies the brutality. But the final humiliation is yet to come.
The classic erotic novel, Histoire d’O (The Story Of O) relates the love of a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer for Rene. As part of that intense love, she demands debasement and severe sexual and pychological tests. It is a unique work not to be missed.
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Vénus Erotica
Anaïs Nin
Readers of Anaïs Nin’s famous diary will know that in 1950, at the instigation of a mysterious collector, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin wrote erotical stories. For a long time, these texts lay dormant. Since its publication, Vénus Erotica has been a constant bestseller, and the critics have enthusiastically welcomed these texts, which are particularly revealing of Anaïs Nin‘s talent as a novelist.
This volume brings together some of Anaïs Nin’s most beautiful texts. Their eroticism is unencumbered by false modesty or the obligatory scenarios of the pornographic genre: they are like real, believable stories, gaining a freshness and a quality of excitement that few erotic stories contain.
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Les 120 journées de Sodome
Marquis de Sade
A veritable hapax legomenon in the history of thought and literature, The 120 Days of Sodom remains a work that is impossible to read without some confusion. Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom is a provocative and unsettling work that challenges conventions and explores the darkest corners of human depravity and excess.
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La Philosophie dans le boudoir
Marquis de Sade
Seven dialogues featuring three debauchees: the voluptuous Sainte-Ange, the ardent Eugénie and the cynical Dolmancé. Sade hijacks the form of philosophical dialogue in vogue in the eighteenth century, in favour of libertinism. He also used the occasion to develop his conception of republican government, which he considered incompatible with religion and with all forms of penal legislation.
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Juliette ou les prospérités du vice
Marquis de Sade
Juliette is Justine’s elder sister. They were both bankers’ daughters, brought up in a convent. They were orphaned and poor when they were about sixteen. They both follow the same path, that of vice. The younger daughter by compulsion, the elder of her own free will. So Justineencounters nothing but difficulties, while Juliette picks nothing but roses. Justine’s story forms the first part. Stripped of all her possessions and hunted by the law, one day she meets a wealthy lady, Juliette, who tells her of her adventures. At the end, Justine is punished.
Juliette is perhaps the Marquis de Sade‘s best novel. The Marquis de Sade himself wrote in praise of his work. He was convinced that he had combined the most cynical language with the most audacious system and the most blasphemous ideas. ‘Only fools will take offence. True virtue is not frightened by paintings of vice. Once the hypocrites had railed against Tartuffe, now the debauchees will attack this book. Nothing like it had ever been written before. No doubt this book is bound to last.’
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Justine ou Les Malheurs de La Vertu
Marquis de Sade
Orphaned at the age of twelve, Justine is expelled from the convent and thrown out on the streets with her sister Juliette, who chooses to engage in prostitution. She, on the other hand, besieged by the turpitude and cruelty of men, fights to defend her virtue. Accused of the worst misdeeds, hunted by the dogs of the odious Count of Bressac, captive of lecherous monks, kidnapped by bandits, pursued by a debauched judge … No insult, whip or rape will be spared to her morality.
Somewhere between a Voltairean tale and a libertine novel, Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu (Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue), written in the Bastille in 1788, was the first work that the Marquis de Sade, freed under the Revolution, saw published during his lifetime. He went on to enrich it with ever more scandalous scenes, under the guise of noble intentions: ‘Woe betide those who set fire to these pictures,’ he warned, ‘but let no one accuse us: there is a kind of corruption that poisons everything, even the virtue that is presented to it’.
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